The Top 50 Best Romance Movies of the Decade (So Far)

How does 'La La Land' hold up against the best romance movies of our time?

Love is forever. Love stories, on the other hand, change all of the time.

The 21st century is a strange and unusual place, historically speaking, loaded with new expectations and unexpected revolutions and technological wonders. The era of lily white romantic comedies about affluent yuppies finding each other is, largely, gone. In its place are a wide variety of new and exploratory romance films – comedies, dramas and beyond – that seek to repackage old storytelling tropes or invent entirely new ones.

It’s an exciting time to fall in love and an incredible time to make movies about it, and that’s why this Valentine’s Day we’re taking a good, long look at all the wonderful, sappy, thrilling, tragic, feel good and erotic films so far this decade. The best romance movies since 2010 are an impressively varied bunch, with action movies, horror movies, musicals, dramas, thrillers and films that are nearly impossible to quantify other than that they are, at their heart, about love.

Make no mistake, lots of movies have love stories but to qualify for this list the movie needed to be fundamentally about love, and could – depending on one’s predilections or mood – theoretically make for a great date movie. (We’re allowing for the fact that some people have old-fashioned tastes in date movies, and that some people have wonderfully weird tastes.)

And we apologize for not putting Fifty Shades of Grey on this list. (Wait, no we don’t…)

The 50 Best Romance Movies of the Decade (So Far):

Update: Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight was accidentally left off of our original list. It is now included in its proper place, at #9, which knocks Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing out of its #50 spot, and off of the list.